Thursday, September 24, 2009

Stop-Motion

Good Lord, I love stop-motion; it's not the most difficult effect to achieve, but it does take obsessive patience. Any film-making amateur who has the will can create something that looks magical.

Here are some of my current faves:

First, Jan Svankmajer: please watch every short and feature-length film this man has made. His work is absurd, terrifying, beautiful and horribly depressing: welcome to the Czech Republic! Almost all of his art takes a not so subtle jab at the smothering routine of life in a communist country.

Seriously, watching all of these films made me excited to go study abroad in CR--what's wrong with me?

Some more recent stuff that is also sweet (none of this comes close to Svankmajer's art...but it's pretty!):

And this final one is an ad (picture me sneering) but I will tamp down my moral objections to consumerism or America or camera companies or whatever it is that I object to because this is just straight AWESOMESAUCE: